[WS:] I can think of a very different and much simpler reason - it does not really matter. It is all fearmongering and creating scary looking shadows that have little connection with reality. I am not more scared by Snowden's "revelations" than by the "Blair Witch Project" movie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project. In both cases, the audience is shown some vague hints and is told to be scared, but not much really happens.
When you think about, the world is full of public and private bureaucracies whose main purpose is contingency planning. They range from military bureaucracies planning different war scenarios to benign agencies like USPS preparing contingency plans for mail delivery after a nuclear attack. In between are various plans for mining or industrial developments, transportation projects etc. that could devastate lives and communities.
Most of us are not even aware of most of these plans, so we are blissfully ignorant of the potential danger that these plans might have created.
Revealing these plans changes nothing in reality but it changes our perception of it. Suddenly people fear scared how close they came to a nuclear war or environmental catastrophe.
Yet, this reaction is an error of judgment known as availability heuristic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic. If something that is merely possible but improbable is portrayed in vivid and colorful terms, availability heuristic makes it seen as highly probable if not imminent.
Snowden's "revelations" are a classic example. What he "revealed" is hardly a secret - it can be inferred from reading the public web page of NSA http://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml which makes it quite obvious that they in the business of electronic spying. Gee golly - the NSA wiretaps electronic communications. And the Pope is Catholic and the bear shits in the woods. Yet the same obvious fact stated in bombastic terms repeated by echo chambers suddenly made it appear as an imminent attack on America itself. Scary, scary, scary.....
In reality, none of that information has been used against US citizens - unlike, say, FBI practices of framing wannabe terrorist. Police entrapment is less effective and more damaging to the rule of law than electronic surveillance, yet it went virtually unnoticed. Yet the electronic surveillance scary stories continues to reverberate in the echo chamber.
However, there is no more reason to be scared or even pay any attention to these scary stories than being scared of the Blair Witch.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."